Dictionary

spacer en · NOUN

Pronunciation

• /ˈspeɪsɚ/ (General-American)
• (Australia) audio

Etymology

Etymology tree Latin spatiumbor. Old French espace Anglo-Norman spacebor. Middle English space English space English -er English spacer From space + -er.

Meanings

1. An object inserted to hold a space open in a row of items, e.g. beads or printed type.
   • The vertical wall was poured in two lifts, using two pairs of steel shutters which were bolted tightly onto 9-in. long wooden spacers. 1959 December 14, Richard Hope, “Narrow Gauge Landslip”, in Railway Magazine, page 866:
2. A person who works or lives in space.
   • It was the futile throwing back in the face of the Spacers their most keenly felt insult: their insistence on considering the natives of Earth as disgustingly diseased. 1954, Isaac Asimov, The Caves of Steel:
   • Shepard: What are you running for? Charles Saracino: I'm seeking one of the five spacer seats in Parliament. They have certain baroque conditions for a citizen to be able to vote for them. Charles Saracino: You have to spend more than six months a year in space. But you can't have stayed in any one settled system for more than a month. 2008, BioWare, Mass Effect (Science Fiction), Redwood City: Electronic Arts, →ISBN, →OCLC, PC, scene: Citadel:
   • "How do I know I can trust you?" asked BKR. Grakker hesitated. "Spacer's oath," he said at last. 2014 [1993], Bruce Coville, Aliens Ate My Homework, page 134:
   • He was thankful that he still had his suit on when the ship had a catastrophic decompression, a spacer's worst nightmare. 2017, A.K. Brown, Humans on the Menu (Champagne Universe Series: Book 2), page 20:
3. A bushing.
4. (slang) A forgetful person; one who spaces out.
5. A type of add-on device used by an asthmatic person to increase the effectiveness of a metered-dose inhaler.
6. (historical) An instrument for reversing a telegraphic current, especially in a marine cable, to increase the speed of transmission.

Forms

Deriveds

T-spacer · spacer oligonucleotide typing · spacer DNA · intergenic spacer · multispacer · flooring spacer · installation spacer · protospacer · geospacer

Translations (6)

fr entretoise (an object) · es separador (an object) · pl przekładka (an object) · es espaciador (an object) · tl pamatlang (an object) · bg ограничител (an object)